About this Book

"I take two short steps and three long ones," Trevor replied, "and they
always miss me." Just then a bullet hit him in the helmet and drove him to the
ground. He got up and shook his fist at the machine gunner, hollering, "You dirty son
of a bitch." After that, Vermeer noted, "He crawled around like the rest of
us."

The second problem for the disembarking rangers was craters, caused by bombs or shells
that had fallen short of the cliff. They were underwater and could not be seen.
"Getting off the ramp," Sergeant South recalled, "my pack and I went into a
bomb crater and the world turned completely to water." He inflated his Mae West and
made it to shore.

Lieutenant Kerchner was determined to be first off his boat. He thought he was going into
a meter or so of water as he hollered "OK, let's go" and jumped. He went in over
his head, losing his rifle. He started to swim in, furious with the British coxswain. The
men behind him saw what had happened and jumped to the sides. They hardly got their feet
wet. "So instead of being the first one ashore, I was one of the last ashore from my
boat. I wanted to find somebody to help me cuss out the British navy, but everybody was
busily engrossed in their own duties so I couldn't get any sympathy."

Two of his men were hit by the machine gun enfilading the beach. "This made me very
angry because I figured he was shooting at me and I had nothing but a pistol."
Kerchner picked up a dead ranger's rifle. "My first impulse was to go after this
machine gun up there, but I immediately realized that this was rather stupid as our
mission was to get to the top of the cliff and get on with destroying those guns.

"It wasn't necessary to tell this man to do this or that man to do that,"
Kerchner said. "They had been trained, they had the order in which they were supposed
to climb the ropes and the men were all moving right in and starting to climb up the
cliff." Kerchner went down the beach to report to Colonel Rudder that the D Company
commander's LCA had sunk. He found Rudder starting to climb one of the rope ladders.

"He didn't seem particularly interested in me informing him that I was assuming
command of the company. He told me to get the hell out of there and get up and climb my
rope." Kerchner did as ordered. He found climbing the cliff "very easy,"
much easier than some of the practice climbs back in England.

The machine gun and the incoming tide gave Sgt. Gene Elder "a certain urgency"
to get off the beach and up the cliff. He and his squad freeclimbed, as they were unable
to touch the cliff. When they reached the top, "I told them, 'Boys, keep your heads
down, because headquarters has fouled up again and has issued the enemy live
ammunition.'"

Other rangers had trouble getting up the cliff. "I went up about, I don't know,
forty, fifty feet," Pvt. Sigurd Sundby remembered. "The rope was wet and kind of
muddy. My hands just couldn't hold, they were like grease, and I came sliding back down.
As I was going down, I wrapped my foot around the rope and slowed myself up as much as I
could, but still I burned my hands. If the rope hadn't been so wet, I wouldn't have been
able to hang on for the burning.

"I landed right beside [Lt. Tod] Sweeney there, and he says, 'What's the matter,
Sundby, chicken? Let me -- I'll show you how to climb.' So he went up first and I was
right up after him, and when I got to the top, Sweeney says, 'Hey, Sundby, don't forget to
zigzag.'"

Sgt. Willian "L-Rod" Petty, who had the reputation of being one of the toughest
of the rangers, a man short on temper and long on aggressiveness, also had trouble with a
wet and muddy rope. As he slipped to the bottom, Capt. Walter Block, the medical officer,
said to Petty, "Soldier, get up that rope to the top of the cliff." Petty turned
to Block, stared him square in the face, and said, "I've been trying to get up this
goddamned rope for five minutes and if you think you can do any better you can f--ing well
do it yourself." Block turned away, trying to control his own temper.

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